Quotes About Perfectionism

Even though I've won numerous titles and an Olympic gold medal, there are still so many faults in my performance that I can honestly hardly bear to watch the videos back.

I'm a true believer that unless you're Prince or Stevie Wonder - and even Prince is showing that he needs help - not everybody can produce themselves. I'm definitely not that person.

Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.

I kind of have my little OCD wood shed at my house where everything is just right when I go write.

There's a lovely character in 'Under Milk Wood' called Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard and she's incredibly tidy and clean. She really is unbearably tidy and clean! And I terrorize my husband when he comes in sometimes from shooting and there's awful dead birds all over the hall that he calls me Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard.

Woody Allen likes to do a lot of master shots. He likes to get the whole thing in one take, and so you could be going along doing a scene, and then the next to last line, all of a sudden, you stumble, and you have to go back to first base.

I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group.

Perfectionism and procrastination have such a fine line. You say, 'Well, I want it to be good. I want it to be perfect.' But what you're really doing is not doing your work. You're putting off showing up and being visible because then you're going to be judged, and it might suck.

Working at the 'Review', if anything, the impression you got was, 'I'll never be good enough. I'll never work hard enough. I'll never be devoted enough.' These people are staying up all night over their sentences!

Where I thrive is with my hands on the keyboard or my pen on the paper. One of the things I get to do is I get to rewrite. I rewrite, and I work hard on my scripts. You can rewrite until you're 'perfect,' and that's something that's safe for me.

I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple's tell-tale white earbuds. But I'm constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?

I'm very hard on myself. If it's a throw that I missed that I know I can make, that's something that I have to correct.

You know that 40 percent of the food in the United States gets thrown away because it doesn't look a certain way. It's crazy: just because the apple is not the right size or the carrot is not straight enough, it just doesn't get accepted.

I have OCD, which is not fun. I have to be incredibly tidy and organized or it messes with my mind and switches off on me.

I think I have minor obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything has to be tidy and just right.

For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.

My dad was very strict. He was absolutely the Tiger Dad. You know, 'You got a 98% on this test? Why didn't you get 100?' That was normal life for my brothers and I.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

The biggest lie in the world is in answer to the question, 'How are you?' People usually say, 'I'm fine,' but that's mostly bull. Everyone wants to display being perfect. They tell themselves and their friends, 'I drive this car, I own this house, I'm fine.' People ball up into these tight wads of repression.

If you wait too long for the perfect idea, your creativity will stay between your ears in inertia.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I don't know how a woman can have such a poor view of herself as to show off poor stitching.

At school, when they had to do group projects, Spencer always insisted on doing most of the work. The others will just screw it up, she always thought. They won't do it as well as I can.